Andrew Chen wrote “Every marketing channel sucks right now“ this week. It most certainly sucks for ‘traditional (messy middle) marketers’, and then there’s iuliia shnai, reaching $500k ARR in a year with a marketing team of she, her, and herself, using almost exclusively SEO. Yes, in 2025. I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently - that the inevitable decline in the effectiveness of all marketing channels has unlikely winners: the most scrappy, resource-deprived marketers and founders who are left with no choice but to innovate - and leverage the amazing (and relatively untapped by traditional marketers) power of AI tools - to both build and market products in ways that have never been done before. And while the rest of us is drowning in reports, zoom calls, and simply the hamster wheel of trying whip more leads out of the existing marketing channels, which are all bringing diminishing returns on spend and rapidly declining in effectiveness - THEY - the scrappy indie hackers

Andrew Chen wrote “Every marketing channel sucks right now“ this week. It most certainly sucks for ‘traditional (messy middle) marketers’, and then there’s iuliia shnai, reaching $500k ARR in a year with a marketing team of she, her, and herself, using almost exclusively SEO. Yes, in 2025. I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently - that the inevitable decline in the effectiveness of all marketing channels has unlikely winners: the most scrappy, resource-deprived marketers and founders who are left with no choice but to innovate - and leverage the amazing (and relatively untapped by traditional marketers) power of AI tools - to both build and market products in ways that have never been done before. And while the rest of us is drowning in reports, zoom calls, and simply the hamster wheel of trying whip more leads out of the existing marketing channels, which are all bringing diminishing returns on spend and rapidly declining in effectiveness - THEY - the scrappy indie hackers - have nothing to lose. And no one to please or report to or mange. So they can spend all the time coming up with innovative ideas - and finally have the tools to do so:

Needless to say- Open AI/Anthropic’s APIs to do programmatic SEO, as well as design/micro tools.

Solutions like Clay, Trigify, ZenABM - which can be used very cheaply if someone’s smart enough to do more intentional trigger-based outreach

LeadMagic, Icypeas, Findymail for contact information at the fraction of the cost offered by market leaders

Tools like HeyReach, Synthesia or Colossyan for scaling webinars or video content with AI avatars + tools like ewebinar to run sessions on autopilot

In 2025, solo indie-hackers come up with uses of AI for marketing that mid-sized teams typically don’t - and that then again, the largest companies do.
Because they can afford the best of both words - throwing more money at the problem of diminishing returns from existing marketing channels, and hiring full-time “innovators” - that can do the same things as the indie hackers - think all day about how to leverage the new tech to better good.

So - the suck-age of marketing in 2025 follows an inverted n inverted-U curve. It doesn’t suck for the solo marketers & scrappy teams who use AI to do things faster & cheaper, and don't have the overhead of “continuing work on the traditional channels”, reporting, hiring or management. It doesn’t suck for the massive teams who have the resources to hire both the doers & dreamers.

But yes, it really sucks for the “messy middle”.

What can we learn from this?

Be better at letting go.

The “messy middle marketing” is an exercise in sunk cost fallacy - and that’s what largely makes it such.

If something isn’t working as it used to, the solution isn’t to do more of what isn’t working - but to take a step back, regroup and start working smarter.

And there are dozens of examples of people who did that - and marketing in 2025 doesn’t have to suck.

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